Market trends in television, B2B video service sector show more and more interest in allowing offering video services to mobile devices. For example, a hotel operator (or any other facility for end users, such as a healthcare facility) may wish to offer users a service of watching video content not only on stationary TV sets of the hotel, but on the users' own mobile devices (such as laptops, tablets or smartphones) as well.
Up to now, video was mostly delivered to customers' premises from a video provider via a regular RF infrastructure (Cable, Terrestrial, Satellite) and a stationary devices (such as set top boxes (STB) or set back boxes (SBB)) at the customer premise were used to decrypt, decode and deliver content directly (for example via a HDMI cable) to TV sets for watching by the end users.
Video delivery of B2B services to mobile devices requires a use of another technology: IP-based and supporting adaptive streaming. To do that in the existing systems, as described before, upgrade of existing operator's network would be needed, for example by installing sophisticated headends to transmit the video content. The B2B sector is smaller than the residential sector, therefore a significant investment to upgrade technology can be problematic to implement.
Delivering video services to mobile devices exhibits challenges related to upgrading the current delivery networks to offer IP unicast transmission and adding capability to broadcast adaptive type streaming (such as HLS, Dash or MS Smooth Streaming), which helps to run smooth services without interruption in open Internet networks, where there is not much control regarding network throughput and capacity.
Delivering video content as a unicast transmission generates a lot of network traffic. Every end-user receives a dedicated stream of data (separate streams are transmitted even to end users watching the same video Running a unicast transmission on existing networks may overload or result in unacceptably low network bandwidth per user.
In order to prepare the network for unicast transmission for mobile devices, significant upgrade is often necessary, which can be expensive and time-consuming. Apart of upgrading the network to unicast transmission, investment on operator's site is needed to build a content delivery network (CDN) capable to serve adaptive streaming. That also requires a significant cost and time investment.
There is therefore a need to provide a way to offer B2B video services to mobile devices which would not require substantial investment in new system elements and would utilize the resources of the existing systems.